12th Annual Santa Fe Bike Swap

 The 12th Annual Santa Fe Bike Swap is tomorrow, May 5th.

I'm trying to get a crowbar into my worldly possessions and downsize a little bit.  The bikes I'm leaving with Bike Santa Fe's Community Table include the Panasonic.  I enjoyed riding it, and I had fun with the coaster brake, but it really is just geared too high for my dodgy left knee, and I didn't want to get too far into the weeds with buying new cogs and chainrings and whatnot.  I've just got far too much other stuff going on, (mostly film photography as far as hobbies go).  I've actually been forced to experiment with shifting my seats back and forth on the bikes I ride regularly so I don't get a stabbing pain in my knee when I'm making the final climb to work.  I've found that shifting my seat forward has helped a great deal on the Rivendell and the Happy Little Three Speed.  That flies in the face of all the advice to shift your seats back, but I think the more my foot is directly over the pedal, the better.  The Raleigh is the bike that seems to work the best with my knee as it currently operates.  I hope that shifting the seats will do the trick, and this is not a preview of old age pains.

The photo is just to show how cluttered your life can become if you live in the same house for decades, even if you are not an out and out hoarder.  I'm also selling the 1984 Trek, which was basically unused when I bought it.  I rode it in one Santa Fe Century.  Since it is in such good shape, I have been hesitant to use it.  I also don't like being that hunched over anymore.  It's a bicycle I like, but I ride it maybe once or twice a year.

I'm also selling our Ryan Duplex recumbent tandem.  You can just see the two seats poking up under the window in the background, and the front wheel on the right side of the photo.  Laura and I rode it in two Santa Fe Centuries, and we rode it around town a little bit, but the thing is so long, that it is a pain to navigate tight turns.  We bought it for $85 at Goodwill some time in the early 2000s.  I'm pricing it at $50, because the captain's seat sometimes does not stay where it is supposed to.  It needs some sort of work.  I'm sure there is a collector or a recumbent enthusiast out there who would pay more, but shipping a bicycle with a ten foot wheelbase is more trouble than it is worth, at least to me.  There are parts on it that I want, but I can't say that I have any bicycle that needs those particular parts, and it feels like a crime to part out a classic recumbent tandem and trash the frame.  If that is what some other person decides to do, they can do it.

That's my son's scooter on the left.  He lives in Chicago now doing dailies for television shows.  I sold the Vespa.  It was another thing I just never rode, and in order to adjust the valves out it, you had to go through all sorts of kniptions to rotate the engine around to get to valves.  That was another thing that was more trouble than it was worth.  It's a long process to sort out exactly which things those are, but I hope to work my way back into a simple beautiful living space.  Can you believe we used to have a table on that back patio and ate out there often in nice weather?  Why do we have two grills?